This Sunday is the premiere of the third season of Mad Men (AMC, 10 pm), the Emmy-winning show that made fans of good television have to figure out where AMC was on their basic-cable schedules. Created and masterminded to an insane level of period accuracy and detail by former Sopranos writer Matthew Weiner, Mad Men follows outwardly dapper, inwardly tormented ad man Don Draper (Jon Hamm) as he makes his progress through the American '60s. The last we saw of him at the end of season two, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Draper had returned from a purgatorial lost weekend in California, outwitted a rival at work, and been allowed back home by long-suffering wife Betty (January Jones), who informed him she was pregnant.

Such a bare-bones plot summary could make someone who hasn't seen the show think that this is merely another period melodrama, a John Cheever knockoff for the small screen with touches of Peyton Place. In fact, Mad Men deliberately avoids all the tropes of generic TV melodrama (e.g., clichéd sentiment, easy moralizing, heartstring-pulling soundtracks) to deliver characters and situations full of vagueness and loaded silences. There's something of Hitchcock's upfront perversity regarding human relations in Weiner's universe, and, for a few brief moments, the fundamental loneliness displayed harkens back to the best of Antonioni. What's left unsaid to play and replay itself in the viewer's imagination is the key element guiding the writing, the acting, and the nuanced direction and editing. As Weiner explained in this month's Vanity Fair: "I count on my subconscious to be consistent. And how that works I have no fucking idea, and I don't even want to investigate it. Because if I lose that I have nothing to say."

A telling, serendipitous juxtaposition occurred during last fall's season: one of the commercial breaks cut to a trailer for Revolutionary Road, the big-budget, Oscar-baiting Sam Mendes adaptation of Richard Yates's cult novel about a couple's disintegration that roughly shares time, place, and many themes with Mad Men. Compared with the show it was interrupting, the Leonardo DiCaprio–Kate Winslet vehicle looked overblown and, well, melodramatic in the worst way. (It didn't help that DiCaprio still looks and sounds like a whiney boy, while Hamm's Draper is a walking monument to troubled testosterone.)

Quality television comes at a price, though: you, me, and everyone we know — to paraphrase Miranda July — watches, has watched, or intends to Netflix-queue Mad Men, Arrested Development, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, etc. But you, me, and everyone we know are between one and two million viewers in a potentially 10 or 20 times larger market that tends to reward with its ad-rate-setting eyeballs shows like the well-made but shallow CSI, the execrable Two and a Half Men, and the current, debased generation of "reality" programs like Real Chance of Love 2.

Our Don Drapers, Ourselves This Sunday is the premiere of the third season of Mad Men (AMC, 10 pm), the Emmy-winning show that made fans of good television have to figure out where AMC was on their basic-cable schedules.

They can handle the truth "We're supposed to show up for our wives and kids in a way that prior generations frankly weren't," says Brookline resident Tom Matlack.

Drink like Don If Mad Men has taught us anything, it's that we shouldn't go to a 1960s advertising executive for health advice.

What Would Joan Do? So you've got a party coming up, a gift due, or a difficult-to-please significant other.

Mad Men on Mass Ave We have many long, painful, Mad Men– less months stretching ahead of us, as we wait for the show to return to AMC and shower us with more broken marriages, snappy quips, jaw-dropping revelations, and (hopefully) amputated limbs.

Two turtle doves Like a mug of hot cocoa after an afternoon of sledding, sometimes a good Christmas gift isn't quite complete without a second one that enhances the pleasures of the first.

Keep up with the Mad Men Don Draper and his ad men swig whiskey all day like it's no thing, but some of you daintier folk may think scotch and bourbon are too harsh.

What would Joan do? In the pilot episode of AMC's Mad Men , Peggy Olson told Joan Holloway: "I'm from Bay Ridge. We have manners."

Sterling-Cooper sells the season The Guide to the Season isn’t about any particular gift, just like it’s not about any particular holiday. It’s a feeling. A sensation. A supplement.

More spooks Two years ago, AMC made a deal to develop a series based on Francis Ford Coppola's classic 1974 film The Conversation . That show still hasn't materialized, but with Rubicon , AMC has now brought us a drama with a similar premise.

Our hams are worth fighting for Judging by the universally glowing reviews and the spitfire personality overhaul of Don Draper — now finally impervious to the dead-eyed glare of that vapid bitch Betty — Sunday's Mad Men season premiere proved the show won't be relinquishing its status as must-see-TV anytime soon.

IAN KING | PANIC GRASS AND FEVER FEW | March 16, 2010 Just a few weeks after we reviewed the belated release of African Head Charge's latest, another, more recent gem from the always rewarding sonic laboratory of Adrian Sherwood arrives.

JOE CUBA | EL ALCALDE DEL BARRIO | March 09, 2010 Fania kicks off 2010 with what is sure to end up being one of the year's most important archival releases of Latin music.

ALEJANDRO FRANOV | DIGITARIA | March 03, 2010 Alejandro Franov is an Argentine multi-instrumentalist who's been involved in the more serious, and often experimental, side of the Buenos Aires music scene since he was a teen in the late 1980s.